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Open BlueDragon and the CFML Advisory Committee

February 5, 2009 ·

A lot of people have asked about OpenBD being represented on the CFML Advisory Committee since the original announcement at CFUNITED 2008. I'm pleased to announce that today Matt Woodward joined the committee, representing the OpenBD CFML engine. We now have the three major CFML engines represented on the committee: Adobe ColdFusion, Railo and Open BlueDragon.Standardization is a long, slow, complex process. It is always a multiple vendor process and it always takes time to assimilate all of the information about each vendor and to figure out where the standard should tread on the paths between all the vendors.
We have been reviewing all the dialects of CFML and figuring out what tags and functions are really core to the language and what are "extensions" in some sense. We've already analyzed Adobe's CFML support and recently we started looking at Railo and OpenBD extensions and, since Gert was already on the committee, it was clear that we needed an official representative of the OpenBD project as well.
I'm very pleased to have Matt on board, knowing that the three major CFML engine projects can work together to help standardize the language and guide the evolution of CFML over the next several years.
I'm under no illusions about the work involved - I was a member of the C++ standardization committee for eight years (and secretary for three years!). We will soon be announcing the committee's website which will provide a definition of what is considered "core" CFML, "extended core" CFML and also what is considered a vendor-specific extension. Over time, we will provide guidance on how all vendors can extend the core language in idiomatic ways, maintaining consistency of the language. We will also, over time, provide a full specification of the CFML language.
We are starting with a simple list of which tags and functions to expect to be implemented, providing a baseline of portability, and we will evolve that to fully specify the behavior of those tags and functions. We will also specify CFScript (since that has never really been documented properly) as we all believe that is a core part of CFML.
Once we publish the website, we will be looking for feedback from the community on the standardization and evolution of CFML.
I think today will be looked back on as a very significant date in the history of CFML!

Great to hear. The committee was a wonderful idea and it's good to see it growing stronger with pretty much all the CFML engines represented. For this to really work, it had to be something bigger than Adobe or any particular group of vendors. It really has to include everyone to have a positive impact on the development of the language.